A yearslong car theft epidemic in Canada has gotten so bad that, despite a police crackdown, thieves break into homes just to steal car keys. Thousands of cars vanish each year.

The phenomenon, records and interviews show, is driven in part by an unexpected source: a booming black market for Western vehicles in wartime Russia.

While Western export bans have severed Russia from much of the auto market, they have not tempered the demand for brand-name SUVs and trucks. That has given rise to a sophisticated network of criminals that steals cars, hides them in shipping containers and sends them to Russia, often by way of the Middle East.

“A forbidden fruit is always sweet,” Daniil Aleynik, a Russian national, said during an interview from a Ukrainian jail, where he was being held on charges of participating in an international car theft scheme. “There are a lot of cars in Canada, and stealing them there is very convenient.”

Interpol, the international police organization, received 4,798 reports that stolen Canadian vehicles had been found in Russia from February 2024 to July 2026, according to data obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by two law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it is considered sensitive.

Pickup trucks like Dodge Rams, Toyota Tundras and Ford F-150s are in particularly high demand.

The Interpol figures significantly undercount the problem, but Russia is by far the top international destination for Canadian cars reported to Interpol, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The number of cars stolen from Canadian streets, parking lots and driveways is a measure of how Western sanctions have had surprising, and at times undesired, consequences. Just as a network of smugglers and dilapidated tankers expanded to evade oil embargoes, criminal groups moved to fill the void when Western automakers left the Russian market and many countries banned auto exports there.

“The stolen cars are not by chance,” said Renato Schipani, who oversees Interpol’s stolen vehicle database. “They are stolen to order.”

Demand for pricey Western cars has always been high in Russia. The sanctions unintentionally incentivized sellers to find illicit ways to supply the market, driving up prices and making the cars even more of a status symbol, Mr. Aleynik said at the Chortkiv detention facility in western Ukraine.

Law enforcement officials, including at Interpol, are investigating whether some of those trucks are being used in overseas battlefields. A propaganda video broadcast last year by a TV channel controlled by the Russian Defense Ministry showed a line of Dodge Ram trucks at a huge Russian drone factory. The video showed a drone being launched from the back of one of the trucks.

In Iran, satellite and open-source imagery reviewed by The Times appears to show Shahed drones on the back of Toyota Tundras. To date, officials have not tracked those vehicles.

The Interpol records are imperfect. Cars can sometimes inadvertently be counted twice, and some countries, including the United States, do not reliably report thefts to Interpol. Others do not report recovered cars. But law enforcement officials say the figures reflect trends and offer an important snapshot of how stolen cars move internationally.

Since Canada’s car theft epidemic began in 2021, officials have introduced policing overhauls and invested tens of millions in tackling the crime. Theft rates have fallen, but stolen vehicles still flow through Canadian ports.

“The majority of the high value vehicles are still being stolen for export — that’s where the money is,” said Bryan Gast, a former police officer who is now intelligence lead for the nonprofit anti-fraud group Équité Association.

Canadian officials recognized early that stolen cars were ending up overseas. But at first, they eyed the wrong countries.

‘The Wild West’

Car thefts surged in Canada after Covid lockdowns were lifted in 2021. With the global supply chain in turmoil, criminals spotted an opportunity. Within a year, auto theft rates in Canada had reached historic highs and continued to climb.

“It was the Wild West,” said Scott Cresswell, a detective at York Regional Police just outside Toronto. “People were having multiple cars stolen. Toronto would have been having 30 cars stolen a night.”

The police recovered cars as often as they could, but thousands disappeared every year. In the hot spots of Ontario and Quebec, nearly half of the stolen cars vanished.

In August 2023, the authorities recovered several stolen cars in Toronto. Their investigation led them to a transnational crime network that was exporting stolen vehicles using bogus paperwork.

After the discovery, the Canadian border agency shifted its approach. Officials had primarily focused on investigating what was arriving in Canada. They began taking a closer look at what was leaving.

Agents began raiding shipping containers. As they did, they realized how lucrative the trade in stolen cars had become.

Frédéric Bonsaint, an officer at the border agency, said that every week, his team searched around a dozen containers at the Port of Montreal and discovered 20 to 30 stolen cars worth in total up to $2 million. Similar checks are carried out at other ports.

One day in June, Mr. Bonsaint cracked open a 40-foot shipping container and peered in with a flashlight. Sandwiched between old mattresses, boxes of household goods and two legal cars was a gleaming white stolen Land Rover. The vehicle was worth around $125,000 new but would most likely sell for nearly double that, Mr. Bonsaint said.

“Vehicle theft is so lucrative for criminals because property theft is not as penalized like other crimes, say trafficking drugs,” Mr. Bonsaint said. “It’s a low-risk, high-reward crime.”

The Land Rover had been bound for West Africa, Mr. Bonsaint said. That region and the Middle East are major destinations for used cars from around the world. For years, the Canadian authorities believed those markets alone were driving the car theft industry.

But it was not the whole story.

The flood of car thefts coincided with the financial sanctions and export bans that Western governments hoped would punish Russia for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That made Western vehicles more valuable.

The Russian black market did not create Canada’s criminal gangs or smuggling networks. Those ingredients were already in place, said Mr. Aleynik, the Russian who faces car theft charges. The sanctions merely increased demand and profits.

Key to the effort, Mr. Aleynik said, are criminal contacts in Canada who falsify customs documents and share the latest intelligence on how to evade checks.

“I’m not going to point any fingers,” Mr. Aleynik said, “because I’ve used their services myself. But that’s why it’s so easy in Canada.”

(Mr. Aleynik, who goes by the online moniker Wasp Killer, has served prison time in Russia for car thefts but denies doing anything illegal in over a decade. Prosecutors say he participated in an extortion racket, brokering the return of stolen cars to owners in exchange for fees.)

Mr. Gast, the former police officer now at Équité Association, said that international buyers placed orders for specific cars. Mr. Aleynik said that happened through online marketplaces that connect black-market buyers and sellers.

If a buyer orders, say, 15 Land Rovers, scouts will scour affluent Canadian neighborhoods and shopping malls for those vehicles.

Stolen cars usually leave Canada through the port of Montreal, but Vancouver has seen a recent uptick in response to an east coast crackdown, officials said.

In 2023, with thefts skyrocketing, officials from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police flew to Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France. They wanted help tracking stolen vehicles and disrupting smuggling routes. They were willing to invest millions to fight the problem.

“Canada faced a big crisis,” Mr. Schipani, the Interpol official, recalled. “We were approached because the problem was so high.”

Interpol’s database contains information on more than 11 million vehicles from 137 countries. Officers who recover a car can check to see if it was reported stolen abroad.

After meeting with the Canadians, Mr. Schipani ran the figures. Huge numbers of recovered Canadian cars, he said, were arriving in Eastern Europe.

Interpol has a policy of not publicly identifying individual member countries. But the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said that the largest number were found in Russia.

Smugglers often moved stolen Canadian cars to Russia via the United Arab Emirates, according to the Mounties. Officials said that they had also identified routes through Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Lithuania.

The Canada-to-Russia pipeline was visible because Moscow remains an active participant in — and sometimes abuser of — Interpol’s information-sharing programs. When the Russian authorities investigate a possible stolen car, they run it through Interpol’s database. With each hit, the database automatically updates to say that a stolen car was found in Russia.

Last year, Detective Cresswell’s team at York Regional Police joined forces with Équité, Interpol and other law enforcement authorities to help Canadians retrieve their stolen cars from overseas. The effort has returned around 200 vehicles to Canada, including some from Russia.

Last month, Mr. Cresswell said, six stolen cars arrived from Russia.

“It’s groundbreaking to get cars repatriated from Russia,” he said. “The idea was once that if a car reaches that soil, the car is gone.”

Why would the Russian authorities return stolen cars to Western countries? One explanation is that Russian law prohibits the registration of vehicles listed in Interpol’s database. Returning them is one way to prevent unusable stolen cars from piling up. Western officials say that Moscow is broadly cooperative when it comes to crimes like auto theft.

That could change. Last month, Russia took steps to allow the registration of cars stolen from “unfriendly countries,” including Canada. A proposal by the Russian Interior Ministry would protect those cars from seizure. European officials have warned that this could fuel a rise in transnational car thefts.

Canada recently increased prison sentences to up to 14 years for auto theft and tightened bail rules.

Mr. Aleynik, who was recently released on bail and is awaiting trial, was dismissive of Western attempts to clamp down on the illicit trade. There is too much money to be made, he said, and people will risk prison. Russians who steal cars risk facing vigilante justice.

“In Russia, no one steals cars, because if you do, you won’t live long,” he said. “In the West, a human life is worth more than a car.”